Shaw, getting stiffly to his feet, stared balefully at Elizabeth and turned to move awkwardly down the walk to the gate. Over his shoulder he said to Rutledge, “I can’t fight you now, but if you don’t come to the inn by midnight, I’m taking matters into my own hands. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you,” Rutledge said, and then: “Can you make it on your own?”

“Damn you, I don’t want your pity! I want answers!”

Rutledge watched him go and waited until Elizabeth, unsatisfied, finally closed the front door. Upstairs at one of the windows overlooking the walk, he could sense Aurore’s eyes on him.

He walked to the museum wing and knocked on the door. When no one answered, in the end Rutledge opened it and walked inside.

He looked carefully through all the rooms. But it was to no purpose.

Simon Wyatt was in none of them, though the door from that wing into the main house was locked.

Chapter Twenty Five

25

Rutledge stood in the middle of the front room of the museum, mocked by the shadowed masks on the wall and the dancing shades of small gods with their strange faces and contorted bodies.

Hamish too was mocking him, reminding him that Hildebrand was ahead of him, that he’d been dragging his feet, that the arrest made tomorrow was one he could—should—have made before this. Only he hadn’t been able to bring himself to it. “You’re faltering, you’re no’ the man you think you are!”

He couldn’t think, he couldn’t bring all the pieces together. Like the gods on the shelves, he was twisting and turning—going nowhere.

But what was the connection—damn it, where was it? What had he missed?

He walked out of the museum and closed the door behind him.

And where was Simon Wyatt?

He went out of the gate and stood looking around him, making sure that Shaw wasn’t loitering in the shadows, waiting for another chance to confront the Wyatts. Which was why he saw the movement among the trees by the church.

He walked that way, taking his time, certain that it was Simon, blacked out again by whatever stress it was that drove him to wander in the night.

His wife’s guilt? Was that what had taken Simon back to the war, where death was imminent and wiped out pain, memory, thought—

He reached the trees, where the shadows were deeper, where only the pale reflection of clothing showed that someone waited. Rutledge hesitated, unwilling to startle Simon, unwilling to give away his own presence if it was someone else.

He walked on, softly, battle trained, but the voice that came to him out of the darkness was not Simon’s, nor was it Shaw’s.